EZDrummer Review [Video]

With Pro Tools, can you automate the Velocity knob and the mixer faders that are in the EZDrummer plugin? What I have in mind is to make some parts of the songs softer (via the Velocity setting) and sometimes for the room mics to be more prominent.

Thanks again!

Chris M.

Thanks for the great review! I love all of your Pro Tools-related videos on YouTube. A great service to the community…

Re: EZDrummer… When you preview grooves inside of the plugin, does it sync with the host’s tempo? I didn’t notice an option for this anywhere on the interface in the video. Addictive Drums, for example, has this option (to either sync to the host, or not).

Thanks again!

Chris M.

Peter

I haven’t heard any comments about a quantizing tool in EZD. Might I have to go into my Cubase 6 and quantize the notes and note clusters as I would using the halion percussions?
Thanks. I’ll take my answer off the air…

Mike G

Love your review Joe. I just purchased EZ Drummer and was wondering if you could tell me how to manipulate/change existing grooves. I am a songwriter and this would be great if i could do this. Any info would be appreciated.

Hey, Joe. I was amazed when I learned the drums on “Change” came from EZ Drummer. It boggled my mind how the software could create such realistic overhead and room mic sounds. Since then, I’ve had to record my own challenging drum parts – I can write a mean piece, but I’m not a drummer! I only imagine it would be much easier to program EZ Drummer.

All this leads to one question: Can one write and program their own parts, or are users stuck with using prefab fills?

Hey Tim. Yep, you don’t have to touch the pre-fab fills if you don’t want to. What I do is find a MIDI groove that’s CLOSE to what I’m looking for, drag it into my song to give it a basic groove, then I’ll go through and manually edit the MIDI notes, adding and taking away hits here and there, to make it unique to that particular song.

Yes, EZDrummer is awesome. The biggest missing piece to a lot of drum programming out there (using Reason or something like that) is a lack of overheads/room mics. An individual snare hit may sound awesome, but it won’t sound realistic if there’s not an overhead track to tie everything together.

clay johnstone

Could you run a short video on integrating a midi drum kit up with ezdrummer and pro tools? I’d think that it would be helpful to many home studio users to see how to assign the various ez drummer drum sounds to a midi drum kit and integrate the ez drummer grooves with our own fills that correspond with the music we ‘ve written so that the fills match nicely with the previous recorded music I’m planning on renting a midi kit this weekend to try to pulll this stunt off in the next few days
We out in cyber space appreciate your committment to learning the ins and outs of the recording process CJ

It was just affecting the audio. It works the same way the mix window in Pro Tools works. It didn’t change the underlying MIDI, it just muted/solo’d the samples I chose.

Mark

Great vid, thanks !
Does it have features that let you “humanize” the midi grooves?

I’ve been looking for a video just like this for ProTools bundled Fxpansion BFD lite drum kit. I didn’t find much out there in youtube world, and its UI is not nearly as user friendly as EZdrummers. I’ve messed with it and it seems to have nice sounds, so I’d like to give this bundled software a go before spending more $$$.

Hey Mark. Yep, there’s a “Humanize” button on the bottom left. Forgot to mention that. Oftentimes I’ll go back and actually randomize the MIDI notes themselves (both velocity and timing) to make it sound even more “human” and less robotic.

Nailed it, as usual Joe – very cool! Great coverage of what’s possible w/ EZDrummer.
I like the realistic sound you can get with this…with the grooves you can import and then MIDI edit/modify to taste, most any 4/4 song could be nailed realistically. A boon to home-studio folks in apartments or even homeowners w/ nosey neighbors. LOL